Sunday, February 24th, 2013
Trinity Anglican Church, Bradford, ON
The Rev. Daniel F. Graves
Text: Luke 13:31-35
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often
have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood
under her wings, and you were not willing!”
-Luke 13:34
If Lent is a time to consider how we might draw closer to
God, then we would do well to consider the ways in which we pull away from him,
or alas, even reject him. Indeed, the
very language I use to refer to God may offer us a hint as to one of those
ways. You will have noticed that I
referred to God as “him.” Do I take this
to be a cardinal sin? No, I do not. I am not amongst those who would have us dump
all masculine imagery about God, wholesale.
I think we ought to retain many of those masculine images of God, most
especially, the healthy ones. What needs
deep consideration are the unhealthy masculine metaphors and faces we have
applied to God. And further, for those
of us who are men to have healthy understanding of our own masculinity, we must
learn to sift and discern the healthy masculine images that flow from God to
our humanity. But if this is true, it is
also true that we must attend to an equally pressing, and indeed possibly more
urgent problem, and that is the suppression of the feminine face of God. It is into this spring of hope that we plunge
today, for in thirteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel we confront one of those
rare moments in Scripture when the feminine divine seeks to enfold us and we,
characteristically, reject it.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and
stones those who are sent to it! How
often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her
brood under her wings, but you were not willing!”
This is, at first glance, a surprising Jesus. This is Jesus as mother. This is Jesus weeping over Jerusalem; weeping
over her children. This is Jesus as
mother who will be shunned for offering her undying love. This is Jesus as the mother
who will be punished and destroyed for loving her children and seeking their
well-being. This is Jesus the mother who
calls to that other mother, Jerusalem, and admonishes her for abandoning her
identity as “mother of us all” by perversely turning against, and destroying
her own children.
None of this should surprise us though, for is Jesus not the
one who challenges violent and patriarchal visions of power by the pouring
forth of love in selfless abandon? This
is not singularly a feminine virtue, rather it is our human calling! Gracious self-offering; selfless abandon! Jesus the perfect human being offering
perfect love for the health, well-being, and very salvation of her
children!
It has been said that to ascribe to God human attributes is
wrong, for God is above human attributes, and God is above gender. But I question this notion. Of course, we put a human face on God because
the ineffability of God is impossible for us to grasp. We give God arms, we give God legs. He counts
the stars with his fingers. He breathes
life into us. We hear his footsteps in the
garden. We say these things about God,
and yet, has not God taken human legs and hands in Jesus? The point is this: we project our humanity
onto God because our humanity flows from God.
Created in the image and likeness of God, male and female (!), our
humanity flows from his divinity. And so
when God chooses to come to us, to reach out to us in deep love, God shows us a
human face. That face is the Christ. The error we have made is to look only at
Jesus the man to the exclusion of Jesus the human. What Jesus accomplishes is that he makes us
partners in the healing work of the gospel and in the persistent proclaiming of
hope, regardless of gender, and indeed, in the fullness of our genders – equal,
different, and partners. Who is it that catches that vision first? Yes, some fishermen begin to follow him, but
it seems at times like dim senses preclude them from understanding, and their
quest for personal glory clouds their vision.
In St. Luke’s gospel, who is it that immediately catches the
vision? Consider Mary, the mother of
Jesus, who in her youthful fright says “yes” to God’s plan of hope and
healing. Consider Simon’s mother-in-law,
whose name is tragically lost to us, who upon being healed rises up to offer
herself in Christian service. Consider the
nameless sinful woman who kisses the feet of Jesus in deep love and prophetic
understanding, anointing him ointment and with her tears. And Mary Magdalene and Joanna who opened
both their purses and their hearts to make his ministry of love possible! And
who stands at the foot of the cross when all others have fled? Who journeys to the tomb? These are the apostles of love, who by God’s
grace, and in spite of the best efforts of violent voices, still leave their
traces in our sacred texts. These are the
voices -- these are the prophets -- that we seek to stone and kill for
fear that they will challenge us beyond what we can bear. But what do they want? What do they
seek? Nothing less than the very longing
of Jesus, the very longing of God, “how I have longed to gather you under my
wings, as a mother hen gathers her brood, but you were not willing.”
Perhaps the supreme and most grotesque irony is the robbing
of Jerusalem of her feminine nature.
The Old Testament prophets understood Jerusalem as the holy place in
which all races, tribes, and nations would be gathered to know the goodness and
salvation of God. To them she was “the
mother of us all.” What might Jerusalem
look like today if we really believed that?
Would the children of Abraham and Sarah so wilfully seek to destroy each
other within her very walls?
But Jesus comes to redeem all of that. “How I have longed to gather you as a mother
hen gathers her brood.” Jesus reminds
Jerusalem that she is a mother, not a warrior or vengeful judge that stones her
own children! “How you would not let me
gather you under my wings!” Jesus cries in anguish. And so he presses forward
to that Holy City to restore, rebuild, and verily, re-create! His entry will be one in humility, not
military might; and his recreating act will be offered in sacrificial love that
consummates the new birth.
We are challenged to the core of our being by these words of
Jesus, by his lament for Jerusalem. This
is a Jesus that sets before us God as mother.
This is a Jesus who offers us the pain of a mother in despair. However,
we encounter also the resilience and persistence of the feminine divine that
presses forward with strength and compassion in equal measure that her children
may not be lost to her. If Luke can dare to imagine God in this way, can we
dare to imagine God our mother who seeks to gather us under her wings? Can we dare to allow that image, and oh so
many more to be liberated from the prisons in which we have kept them suppressed,
deep in some dark chamber within us? Can
we dare to draw close to God our mother?
Can we dare to draw close to the feminine face of God? Or shall we be
like Jerusalem, turning her back on who she is, stoning her own children? Shall we not only seek to suppress the
fullness of humanity but the fullness of divinity? There are wings waiting –
longing ! – to enfold us.
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